The Balkanized readership of Ivo Andric
For readers of Ivo Andric who are not from the Balkans, the Nobel Prize winning writer seems far from controversial. If anything, the author of The Bridge on the Drina may seem a somewhat old-fashioned novelist, a good and colorful storyteller, ] – hardly someone who deserves an assessment like the following:
“The writing of Ivo Andric caused more damage [to] the Bosniaks than all of the armies that have ravaged Bosnia,” Academician Muhamed Filipovic said.
Wow! That’s pretty severe. And though nothing will convince me that the aforementioned academician isn’t exaggerating just a tad, the article on Bosnian and Croatian ambivalence toward the Bosnian-born Croat writer at SETimes offers a perspective that is impossible for an outsider to dismiss.
Still, for those outside the fray, if all you have read is his most famous novel – go out and get a copy of The Damned Yard, a brilliant novella that shows another dimension to Andric’s writing.
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